


Empty Vessel

by JoJolightningfingers



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, M/M, Nightmares, death imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2020-12-21 09:58:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21073031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJolightningfingers/pseuds/JoJolightningfingers
Summary: Dimitri, Felix, and the ghost they have in common.Sort of AU where Byleth doesn't exist and Felix is the first to find Dimitri at Garreg Mach instead. Also a weird treatise on how Felix and Dimitri deal with Glenn's ghost hanging metaphorically over their shoulders.





	1. Felix

Felix comes awake one night tasting grave soil on the back of his tongue, alkaline grit and his breath replaced by clouds of bottleflies. Where his conscious mind flounders, slumber stripping it of discipline, his heart steadies—a frenetic, untamed reminder of his place among the living.

The dream is so familiar he can conjure it waking, if he chooses, recurrent as it has been since his brother's armor came home riven and dented on a bier. He has done so countless times, rolling it about a mental tabletop in the quiet, unaccompanied moments; over time its edges rounded, resultantly, it no longer bothers him whether the face it concludes with is Glenn's or his own or their father's. They look so similar as to be interchangeable, and though Felix resents how effortlessly that allows others to transpose him with his family, he is too grown to pretend he will not, someday, feed worms like them.

This time, the face in the dream did not belong to any Fraldarius. This time Felix saw a boar, crowned in gold, the bright star of one eye sightless and so painfully summer-sky blue.

Felix has learned the futility and self-destruction inherent in chasing ghosts. He believes, or at the minimum he hopes, that he is not going to find one at the end of this impulsive and foolhardy search. In this way, he permits himself to retain the fantasy that chasing a ghost is not exactly what he is setting out to do.

* * *

Not long before his death, Glenn taught his younger brother how to navigate using the sun and stars. _So you never get lost out there,_ Felix remembered him saying, ears and nose burned red by the encroaching Faerghus winter, lanternlight gentling the smile he wore.

He was too late, too young, to do more than bury Glenn, and if he has guessed wrong now, he will be too late again—if he is not already, a thought he does not entertain for more than a sigh's length. The rumors circling the Kingdom like starved carrion birds have neither changed nor abated: something haunts Garreg Mach, something titanic and shaggy and monstrously strong that gorges on Adrestian men. Whether the monster harbored some shard of honor for their five-year-old vow or wandered there, lost, by chance, Felix could not care less, so long as he _is_ where the hearsay places him.

_And if he is_, intrudes the thought inevitably, _what then?_

Then Felix will dig like he dug for his brother, bloody his hands upturning the frozen earth and the things lost to time beneath it. It is up to the monster, whether Felix buries him or disinters him instead, drags him out of a grave he made for himself to wallow with his rotting regret.

The sun has not crested the distant horizon yet, but every second Felix tarries drives his fractious heart a rung higher up his throat. He mounts his horse and spurs it on, following the faint string of stars that signpost the way to the monastery, until dawn blots them out.

* * *

In the ruins of the grand cathedral, what remains of the prince leans crooked against a shattered plinth, a lonely silver moonbeam lifting the shadows that curtain him. Felix beholds him, gaze sweeping slack posture and overgrown hair, the isolate boar-tusk clutched in rigored grip, the red-clad corpses carpeting the nave, and he does not breathe.

With his blood drumming in his ears and the whole world drained of color, Felix fails to notice that the mass twitches in reaction to the sound of his approach, to his boots coming up tacky with every leaden step. Areadbhar swings down from the gloom like a reaper's scythe and Felix cannot free his sword of its sheathe before he is sighting down the spear's length, to meet a stare still as wide and blue as the summer sky in Fhirdiad.

Felix still cannot breathe, but for an entirely separate reason.

And then, slow yet sudden, that one wild eye _recognizes_; Dimitri trembles as if cold, and his Relic falls from nerveless fingers to clatter on the rubble.

In the thready, scared tones of a child, sticking his back to the wall, arms raising plaintively to shield his face from whatever vengeance he imagines will be taken of him, Dimitri whispers, “Glenn?”

Felix's insides wrench as though he's the one with the wound—now that Dimitri has shifted Felix sees the liquid glimmer of fresh blood running oil-dark off the corners of his cowters. “No; it's Felix,” he corrects, sullen and shell-hollow, and he takes a knee to reinforce the tatty field dressing Dimitri had managed without aid. A hundred questions gnaw pits in his chest in their anxiety for release, but Dimitri repeats his name back to him, lucid and relieved, and Felix lets them wither—for the moment, that is all he needs to hear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: look, you're already two longfics deep into WIPception. don't let this muse consume you, put some restraints on it: ten sentences per pair of lyrics and that's IT.  
me, constructing sentences a mile long to get around this restriction: the rules of grammar are fake. english is a shambling inbred homunculus of a language. fuck you.
> 
> If you can guess both the Hozier tune this pretty directly arose from and the fanart that influenced the last third, I applaud you for your taste in both visual and auditory art.
> 
> Next chapter is the last half of the song, from Dimitri POV!


	2. Dimitri

Coming up, Kingdom boys learn, alongside blade and lance, the ethos of the warriors who wield them—with cautionary emphasis on the fallen who clutched their regrets to their torn chests as they slid into their tombs. None of the warnings mentioned that the ghosts could misinterpret flesh as earth and spade through both with equal ease, uprooting him the same as any common garden weed. This desiccated carcass of a church may now well be the underworld of childhood nightmare, in all its jagged lightless glory—this, Dimitri assures himself, is why they have confused him for another broken, empty headstone. The unacceptable alternative stares him down with Glenn’s eyes and Glenn’s stony frown and Dimitri quails at the implications of how solid his presence seems—his wound cannot possibly be so severe, pleads his panicked heart as he cringes away, his work among the still-living has not yet concluded.

The specter gives a different name to the one he appeals it with, lips twisted like it has an abhorrent taste. Dimitri freezes—the tongues of his ghosts drip wrath, not that venomous resentment. What stands before him is blood and bone and bitter, and now that Dimitri sees him properly, he can place the name of the weightless burden that slopes his shoulders, for he knows it well.

What stands before him is Felix, alive despite the washed-out appearance of his silhouette, an _understanding_ in his eyes mirroring the ache in Dimitri’s chest.

“Felix,” he sighs, and lets his friend set hands on him, lower his shield, unbuckle the ruined plate that failed to guard him.

“Shut up, you’re bleeding everywhere,” snaps Felix, and Dimitri raises no protest at his tone—his touch is so warm as to burn him, and the prince believes he understands now why they say ghosts search eternity for light, and find it roosting in the hearts of living men.

* * *

The day of the Millennium Festival dawns and the sun has had barely enough time to kiss the earth before Ingrid arrives in a chorus of feathers and the distinctive clatter of shod hooves on stone. She is only the earliest—by midday the rest have joined them and greeted him, hopeful at the start and uneasy a curt half-second later. Even Dedue is present, though the others cannot see him.

As the erstwhile Blue Lions coalesce together to chatter and catch up and share in the joy of reunion, Dimitri drifts apart—a drop of oil separating out from water. A Dimitri five years younger, he reflects, would be enthusiastically welcoming them, would gravitate towards their center—around that reminiscence, he feels the same nothing that he’s left with when his battle rage recedes.

Felix, likewise, accedes to the bare minimum of pleasantries required and removes himself, enough to dissuade further attempts at conversation but not so much so as to be called truly detached. Dimitri watches him step back from the crowd and, after a moment’s pause, wander a few paces nearer to him with a nonchalance so obviously counterfeit that it tempts him to laugh. Subtlety’s never been a strong suit of Felix’s; he need not look to know Felix is falling back into a now-familiar orbit around him—close but not enough to touch, far but not enough to miss.

It’s a strange dance they’ve mastered, steps they knew without being taught, not even by the ghosts that were their only companions for the scant hours they’ve had alone together. As pitiful, as irksome as Dimitri regards the distance, he cannot pretend he doesn’t know why it’s there—and it’s coldly satisfying (comforting) too, that Felix, despite it, sought him out before the others did.

* * *

Rendering the monastery fit for human habitation, when they decide to use it as a base, becomes an exercise in triage. Like schoolchildren, they assign chores, matching task to talent—the Knights of Seiros tidy the keep, Ashe inventories provisions, Ingrid scouts the adjoining towns from on high, and so on down the order. Dimitri sentences himself to exhuming the cathedral—he cares little for the sentiment of comfort and home but these days-old dead are his responsibility anyway, being as he made them, they’re his to be haunted by and nobody else’s. Gradually he loses track of how long he spends listening to their abusive oaths as he relieves them of anything useful and carts them off in pairs, one slung over each shoulder, and throws them like so much refuse down the cliffside.

It’s long enough that when he turns around and spots a flash of midnight blue and pale skin, adrenaline nearly chokes him, but the footsteps he hadn’t heard approaching before ground him—this is Felix, not Glenn. “I thought you were inspecting the weapon stores,” he growls by way of greeting, watching Felix’s eyes slide to the pile of trophies he’d stripped from the bodies, narrow, and then snap back to him.

“I finished,” Felix answers bluntly, and then, more hostile: “What _happened_ to you?”

Dimitri is surprised at himself, that even after all this time estranged he can read, in Felix’s posture, the helpless frustration that underlies his accusation, though which of them it’s directed towards is something he’s lost the ability to ascertain. But the first law of magnetism is that like repels like—so long as they both stand under Glenn’s shadow, there is nothing they can do for each other, no matter how much Felix may wish otherwise.

“I told you,” Dimitri sighs, letting the fury that burns endless in his chest keep him upright through the sudden weary spell, “I died.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW i didn't mean for this to take as long as it did.
> 
> perceptive readers who have guessed the song this is based off of will note that the song is not quite finished yet, there's still another pair of lyrics to account for. an epilogue is in the works. what, you really think i'd let it end on such a downcast note?
> 
> other perceptive readers may note that despite having the same number of sentences, this chapter is 100 words longer than the last and honestly i dont know what to tell you. sorry for all these blasphemes against the laws of english grammar (which, i remind you, are fake)


End file.
